• Infographic of the Day: Bailouts Around the World

    Updated: 2010-01-29 20:09:46
    | Peter Klein | Via HBR, bank bailouts and stimulus packages as percentages of GDP. China tops (bottoms?) the list with stimulus goodies worth a whopping 47% of GDP. Filed under: - Klein -, Bailout, Political Economy

  • The Era of Laissez-Faire?

    Updated: 2010-01-28 19:08:18
    | Peter Klein | One of the established memes about the financial crisis is that it demonstrates the failure of unfettered capitalism, the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire environment that prevailed in the West over the last few decades, all driven by the ideology of “free-market fundamentalism.” This seems to be a truism among most of the Commentariat. Of [...]

  • Hayekian Comments on Student Papers

    Updated: 2010-01-27 18:40:08
    | Peter Klein | A grad student inspired these: “The writer clearly suffers from a fatal conceit.” “Reading this proposal helps me understand the knowledge problem.” “Your paper appears to be the result of human action, but not human design.” “The proposed outline reveals how little people really know about what they imagine they can design.” Your suggestions? Posted in - Klein [...]

  • ISNIE 2010 Call for Papers

    Updated: 2010-01-27 14:40:37
    | Peter Klein | The Call for Papers is out for the International Society for New Institutional Economics’s 2010 meeting, 17-19 June in Stirling, Scotland. Proposals are due 1 March. President-Elect Frank Stephen is putting together an impressive program with keynotes from Bruno Frey and two longtime ISNIE members you may have heard of: Elinor Ostrom and [...]

  • Keynes vs. Hayek Rap Battle

    Updated: 2010-01-26 14:18:11
    | Lasse Lien | If you’re teaching macro or the history of economic thought and you feel you’re not getting through to the kids, this video might be worth a try. Thanks to Eirik Sjåholm Knudsen for the pointer. Posted in - Lien -, Ephemera

  • Mutual Admiration Clubs

    Updated: 2010-01-26 09:53:49
    | Lasse Lien | Check out this cool paper by Wing Suen, titled “Mutual Admiration Clubs.” This article proposes a theory of group formation based on the motive to seek informed opinion. Because an individual evaluates whether others are informed or not using his own priors, he identifies people with similar beliefs to be more informed than [...]

  • New Issue of ICC

    Updated: 2010-01-25 20:18:54
    | Dick Langlois | A new issue of Industrial and Corporate Change is out (TOC here) with a bunch of interesting articles. Prominent among them is a well-researched and nicely written piece by Pierre Desrochers that argues a politically unpopular view about corporations and the environment. Free speech in action? Posted in - Langlois -, Business History, [...]

  • Corporations Are People Too

    Updated: 2010-01-25 19:39:59
    | Craig Pirrong | Legally, in some respects, anyways. That was a key issue in the recent Supreme Court decision re McCain-Feingold (see Dick’s post). I don’t have a lot to say about the specifics of the decision, as campaign finance law is way too arcane for me. Suffice it to say that I am inherently [...]

  • Paging John Stuart Mill

    Updated: 2010-01-25 18:36:31
    | Dick Langlois | I have been amused by the firestorm of outrage in the press over the Supreme Court’s recent mild affirmation of the free-speech rights of corporations. As many readers of this blog will probably appreciate, the point of a right to free speech is that it must apply even to speech, and [...]

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